Whose Palace is it Anyway? New Document Could Undermine Vasundhara Raje"s Defence

New Delhi:  As BJP leader Vasundhra Raje confronts allegations that she conspired with tainted cricket mogul Lalit Modi to wrongly exploit a government property as a heritage hotel run by their firm, NDTV has accessed new documents that could escalate the controversy.

The Dholpur Palace, located about 40 km from Agra, originally belonged to the royal family of Hemant Singh, the estranged husband of Ms Raje, who is the Chief Minister of Rajasthan.

NDTV has accessed an agreement from 1949 between the government and the royal family of Dholpur that granted Hemant Singh’s father the right to personal use of the palace for his lifetime. The Congress says that in later years, the government acquired the palace. The BJP says that acquisition was temporary, and that it was returned to Hemant Singh’s family.

Ms Raje has been cornered in recent weeks over her deep connections to Mr Modi which include an affidavit that she secretly signed in support of his UK immigration appeal. Between 2007 and 2009, he pumped nearly Rs 13 crore into a company owned by her son, Dushyant Singh, a parliamentarian. The Chief Minister has stake in the same firm, Niyant Heritage Hotels Private Limited, whose main asset is the vast Dholpur Palace.

The Congress says that an array of documents including land records establish that the red sandstone mansion was acquired by the government in the early 1950s. This was corroborated by Hemant Singh in writing in the 1980s as part of a legal dispute over the property. The BJP says this affidavit was mistakenly signed by Ms Raje’s former husband and that it has its own sets of papers to prove that in 2007, the palace was given to Dushyant Singh by his father.

In 2010, the BJP says, the then Congress government that was in power in Rajasthan also paid Dushyant Singh nearly 2 crores to acquire a part of the Dholpur property to facilitate the construction of a large highway.  This compensation clearly proves that the government accepted him as the owner, Ms Raje’s party says.

The luxury hotel is crucial to the deal between Dushyant Singh’s firm and  Mr Modi, who moved to London in 2010 after being named in many corruption cases in India. The BJP says the palace, with a market worth of nearly 300 crores, is why Mr Modi paid nearly one lakh each for Rs 10 shares in a firm that was loss-making. The party also says that all financial dealings between Ms Raje’s son and the cricket magnate were declared and duly taxed.

The documents accessed by NDTV: